Ronaldo Lemos on Cultural Commons in Developing Countries
Recorded video available via http://creativecommons.org.tw/gallery/Conf07/cctw-conf07-part-01.wmv
Description
"Developing countries are facing new challenges because of the Internet and the digital technology. In Latin America, the traditional means for access to knowledge have been changing fast, shaking established business models. Different industries are affected: the music industry, the film industry, as well as the publishing industry and the press.
The music industry and the press have seen their outreach plummeting, in face of competition with the Internet and other business models. The film industry remains controlled basically by movies produced in the US, but this business model also shows signs of exhaustion, with a decreasing number of movie theaters and box office revenues. The publishing industry faces organizational challenges, such as the very few numbers of bookstores, due to the lack of incentives to create new ones.
At the same time these challenges are taking place, new trends are emerging. The first is new media models, such as open publishing, online record labels, videologs, and the so-called citizen journalism phenomenon. Accordingly, the so-called "Web 2.0" (a buzz-word invented by Tim O'Reilly to describe collaborative tools at the Internet) can also be seen in operation in developing countries, particularly in Brazil.
Nevertheless, these tools are only in an initial stage. In spite of their promising character for the future of access to knowledge in developing countries, they are not yet ripe enough for affecting society as whole. Accordingly, other phenomena related to technology are taking place, especially at the poorest cities and neighborhoods of the country, this time significantly affecting cultural production in connection with a large number of people.
These new events consist of the appropriation of technology on the part of the so-called "peripheries", that is, the most marginalized and impoverished areas of developing countries. These peripheries are using technology in order to produce their own cultural industries. Technology is also being used to create original content, produced and distributed directly within the poor areas, skipping intermediaries and moving away from the idea of piracy. Piracy, accordingly, becomes in many instances no longer a significant activity, because content is being produced and sold deliberately and directly throughout the former "pirates". These emerging cultural industries taking place at the global peripheries might represent one of the most exciting possibilities of cultural autonomy in a global world." (http://creativecommons.org.tw/static/conference2007/sessions/abstract/english)